Caught mired down, as it were, in some Louisiana bog with the nutria rats of such waterways, amongst the wankers and assorted riff raffs of literary professor-poets, Skip Fox has been writing poems of a stable luminosity of which The Poets do dig. Let it be said, his work is well above par; never to be found about to back down from looking a glum wit or kilobyte trawling neophyte in the eye and calling out the kooks in the literary (& literal) machinery of the imagination.
Fox is never boring. He is always pushing the language of the poem to yield to the point of bursting; he's never easing off as so many others do to lazily spit out fine muffins from off his haunches. Firmly refusing to participate in the charade of undeserved kickbacks and easy slings of rehashed gimmick, Fox is nothing less than all in.
A colossus of a grasp at an endeavor that's rather appropriately headed nowhere in particular, Fox's work is a life's work, is the life work. It is a following through on the injunction given in Robert Duncan's statement Fox uses as epigraph to this Selected, "we obey the orders that appear in our work." This isn't a priority of picking up on skill so much as it is tune. The Poet must hear what is read. In the end, it comes to a well measured living. Between the writing and the reading, arrives the composition of the whole.
—Patrick James Dunagan, Switchback, May 7th, 2012
Sheer Indefinite is a collection of considerable weight, wisdom and humanity. It's the best of Skip Fox over a twenty-year period, 1991-2011, and for anyone who has read any of his work, enjoyed even one of his intensely personal, miles-deep poetry collections, that can amount to a pretty heady brew of material. Passages like the one abound in Sheer Indefinite. Although many of the poems play some wild, complex games with form and style, you can find lines and images like the one from "The Garden of Earthly Delights" in just about every poem brought together here.
Fox has been a teacher for over thirty years. You don't have to know that to enjoy pieces like "Death blossoms in oblivion", or the intense, burning, unreal "Economics of Metonymy: sic transit", but it does give you added insight into the unbelievable range of styles, and ambition of turning poetic conventions upside down or inside out that Fox realizes over and over again. This collection leaves little doubt of Fox's love and experience with poetry. Part of that love is expressed by seemingly never running out of ways to build roads for his words to travel on. To see those roads in a physical form would be to see something along the lines of an MC Escher painting.
Sheer Indefinite is in the end a triumph of deepness. There's depth in the language, how that language breathes and speaks, and most of all in the places those images inevitably take us. Some ("from "Scrolls, Clouds and Earth" has to be read to believe the creative heights it reaches) travel across as a city of thoughts as large as the world. While completely different pieces ("Meanwhile. A lull, like dying of yellow.") take small details and stretch them out to reveal more than we ever would have suspected. The possibilities never end. Twenty years of poetry across nearly two hundred pages. It's an autobiography with time enough to look at the world around the life observing it. It's a history that hasn't even come close to dying yet.
—Gabriel Ricard, Drunk Monkeys, May 14th, 2012
Poet Skip Fox is a man madly in love with words. More than a book of selected poems that spans two decades of published work, Sheer Indefinite, his latest release, reads like a very personal love letter to language. For Fox, "words come with their own illumination," and his writing is a quest to make that light dance in new ways. He wants to see "words smacking with words" and even some "words sodomizing other words." As a result of that desire, the poetry in Sheer Indefinite turns into a "portal through which we are seen and whereby we see."
There are life experiences and questions here. Fear, guilt, romance and a breeze that moves through the trees and through the pages of the book.
Fox is certainly willing to explore with space on the page and rhythm. Some poems look like they are dripping down the page while other make the reader think the words are angry at each other. The result is a collection that has a bit of everything. Styles and themes abound, but the word, the way it's used and explored, always remains at the epicenter of the poems.
—Gabino Iglesias, Black Heart Magazine; May 22nd, 2012
Review Content:Sheer Indefinite is a selected collection of Fox's poetry from 1991 to 2011. These poems range widely over time and place. Fox writes of angels, emotion, nature, how the singular human experience weaves and winds out and into the greater whole. There is a sense of the mythic being matched with the empirical; a vastness, a sense of boundlessness, swirling and reaching like words tied to an arrow and shot out into the sky.
Have you ever been to a concert where Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9 is being played and you've reached the 3rd movement and are feeling roused by the angry passion of the Presto; only to find as the violinist takes a breath to recover from the exuberance of the previous movements that you are applauding at the wrong moment, before the piece is even over? Although you are sheepishly huddled in your seat, you are secretly thrilled there is more to come.
This happens with Skip Fox's poetry – tidbits which continue the line of form and thought, extras adding an unexpected lustre.
There are no straight lines in Fox's poetry. There are spiderwebs. There are tapestries. Detailed, elaborate, a nexus of highways and byways carrying his poetry from "cement kangaroos on the playground" ('Where they live and what for') to "a universe without stars" ('in esse.') Fox is a poet of real power and complexity; a richly textured voice; polished, significant, unflinching.
— Selma Sergent, Tuck Magazine; June 1, 2012
